\n<\/p>\n
In the opening scene of the black comedy The Death of Stalin<\/em>, a violinist in Moscow is told her orchestra is giving a command performance for Joseph Stalin, and refuses to play on political grounds. A frantic radio director, fearing he will be arrested or shot if he fails to produce the concert in time, begs her to reconsider, finally prevailing with an offer of 20,000 rubles.<\/p>\n Recently, the Trump administration faced a similar situation. After Donald Trump purported to rename the Kennedy Center after himself, the jazz musician Chuck Redd withdrew from a planned Christmas Eve concert. The administration\u2019s response was somehow both more authoritarian and comic than the one in the movie.<\/p>\n The Kennedy Center\u2019s president, Richard Grenell, announced that the Center intends to sue Redd for his impudence. Grennell\u2019s letter threatening legal action depicts Redd as a sad loser suffering \u201cdismal ticket sales and lack of donor support\u201d and \u201clagging\u201d attendance whose withdrawal, paradoxically, is \u201cvery costly to a non-profit Arts institution.\u201d<\/p>\n One might presume the withdrawal of an obscure performer detested by the audience and donors alike would be easily brushed off, or even welcomed. Yet Grenell demands $1 million in damages.<\/p>\n Grenell\u2019s letter argues not only that Redd has harmed the Center\u2019s finances, but that his withdrawal constitutes an \u201cact of intolerance\u201d driven by \u201cthe sad bullying tactics employed by certain elements on the left.\u201d Grenell vows, \u201cWe will not let them cancel shows without consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n This is a strange interpretation of \u201ccancel culture.\u201d The concept, in its original form, described a tendency on the political left to react to minor ideological or linguistic offenses by demanding firings or social shunning, demands often reinforced by outraged social-media mobs. The problem with cancel culture\u2014from the liberal standpoint, anyway\u2014is that it is coercive.<\/p>\n But for an individual to decide not to participate in a politicized ritual at an artistic institution now renamed, Soviet-style, after the still-living head of its reigning personality cult is not coercive. Permitting individuals to choose which ideas they wish to endorse is the essence of liberalism.<\/p>\n The MAGA movement, of course, has no use for liberalism, which is why it naturally sees such an act of conscience as an attack. \u201cThe outrageous behavior is scarcely out of the ordinary for a political side less reliant on policy platforms and more reliant on bullets of deranged assassins,\u201d fumes a column in Steve Bannon\u2019s National Pulse<\/em>, tweeted out by the official Kennedy Center social-media account.<\/p>\n In the minds of President Trump\u2019s loyalists, refusing to genuflect to the great leader reflects the same general impulse as attempting to assassinate him. This was Stalin\u2019s premise, too. Imposing the personality cult upon the state is designed not only to burnish the leader\u2019s image, but to create opportunities to smoke out dissidents. Trump\u2019s mania for renaming things after himself and turning his birthday into a national holiday celebrated with military parades forces individual members of the bureaucracy to choose between complying with his ego-gratifying demands or exposing themselves as the kind of officials who might decline illegal orders.<\/p>\n The comic aspect of the Kennedy Center threat is that Trump has little leverage over artists. He can fire a general who refuses to organize a parade for him, but he can\u2019t make Lin-Manuel Miranda put Hamilton<\/em> in the Kennedy Center.<\/p>\n The administration\u2019s apparent plan to resolve this difficulty is to shame or browbeat members of the artistic community into performing there. \u201cAny artist cancelling their show at the Trump Kennedy Center over political differences isn\u2019t courageous or principled\u2014they are selfish, intolerant, and have failed to meet the basic duty of a public artist: to perform for all people,\u201d the Center\u2019s vice president of public relations told the New York Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n Trump has treated last year\u2019s election as eternal proof that he is the incarnation of the public will and that any opposition to him is a kind of alienation from the people. From this belief, it follows that performing in Trump\u2019s cultural center is a public duty. But since the administration currently lacks the power to lock up artists who don\u2019t comply, this demand is as silly as it is presumptuous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the opening scene of the black comedy The Death of Stalin, a violinist in Moscow is told her orchestra is giving a command performance for Joseph Stalin, and refuses to play on political grounds. A frantic radio director, fearing he will be arrested or shot if he fails to produce the concert in time,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39636,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2110,4818,241,3982],"class_list":{"0":"post-39635","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-center","9":"tag-kennedy","10":"tag-show","11":"tag-wont"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}